I'm John Batser with my good colleague Judy Dempsey of Strategic Europe.

She's the editor-in-chief, she's in Berlin.

And the headline in Reuters tells the beginning of a story that's

extremely difficult to clarify so I asked Judy's help. Russian lawmaker and

a Putin ally says the US is behind the arrest of the

telegram boss. Yes that's I'll read that again.

Moscow's is saying that the US moved France to detain the boss of Telegram, a very popular social media site throughout Russia everywhere really but his name is

Pavel Duro. And Judy this is so many layers I can't solve it in one paragraph I

will say that the Kremlin is very unhappy with France and France is now tangled

with Russia in a way that we've not seen in a hundred years.

There's reason to believe that early on in the Ukraine war,

McCrone saw himself as a peacemaker.

This does not look like peacemaking.

These are EU digital rules.

Can you help my audience understand the risk France is taking in the Russian opposition?

Okay. in the Russian opposition.

Okay. That's a big issue.

I mean, trans under President Emmanuel Macron has just completely changes policy towards Russia and it's so pro-Ukraine at the

moment. But this is a very interesting case about the arrest of Pavildurev.

He's the founder of the Telegraph social network.

And so in Europe, maybe this feeling that Europe is trying to prepare for the next prisoner exchange, but Macron just tried to didn't discuss this at all last night in a discussion.

He said he was defending the independence of the French judiciary.

...